It’s a busy-busy day today, but I wanted to direct your attention to an article at Forbes by Warren Meyer of Climate Skeptic, which provides an excellent summation of the reasons behind the dissenters’ argument against anthropogenic global warming:

In last week’s column, I lamented the devolution of the climate debate into dueling ad hominem attacks, which has led in almost a straight line to the incredible totalitarian vision of the 10:10 climate group’s recent film showing school kids getting blown up for not adhering to the global warming alarmists’ position.

In writing that column, it struck me that it was not surprising that many average folks may be unfamiliar with the science behind the climate skeptic’s position, since it almost never appears anywhere in the press. This week I want to give a necessarily brief summary of the skeptic’s case. There is not space here to include all the charts and numbers; for those interested, this video and slide presentation provides much of the analytical backup.

It is important to begin by emphasizing that few skeptics doubt or deny that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas or that it and other greenhouse gasses (water vapor being the most important) help to warm the surface of the Earth. Further, few skeptics deny that man is probably contributing to higher CO2 levels through his burning of fossil fuels, though remember we are talking about a maximum total change in atmospheric CO2 concentration due to man of about 0.01% over the last 100 years.

What skeptics deny is the catastrophe, the notion that man’s incremental contributions to CO2 levels will create catastrophic warming and wildly adverse climate changes. To understand the skeptic’s position requires understanding something about the alarmists’ case that is seldom discussed in the press: the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming is actually comprised of two separate, linked theories, of which only the first is frequently discussed in the media.

Emphasis added.

Do read the whole thing; I don’t think you’ll find a better introduction.

Shrieks of “HERESY!!” and “APOSTASY!!” must be echoing through the Cathedral of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming right about now, as a former University of Ottawa professor says that fossil fuels are insignificant to the amount of CO2 in the air:

The present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans) fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP) (both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole planet. And of course all biomass can in principle be considered fuel that could be burned with oxygen (O2) to produce CO2 gas, H2O water, energy, and an ash residue.

This shows the extent to which anthropogenic energy production from fossil fuel burning is small in comparison to the sun’s energy delivery to Earth, since biomass primary production results from the sun’s energy via photosynthesis.

(…)

Given all the fuss that is made about the present rate of fossil fuel burning (2010; 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y where 10^13 = 10,000,000,000,000 with thirteen zeros), it is important to keep in mind that this represents an amount of CO2 release comparable to or somewhat less than the CO2 released by simple breathing from humankind and its domestic animals [LINK]. The combined biomass of humankind and its domestic animals (cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, pets, etc.) is in turn estimated to be only 0.04% of Earth’s living biomass (all expressed as kilograms of carbon, kg-C), which is a lot more CO2-producing breathing. (Ants, for example, are estimated to represent ten to one hundred times the biomass of humankind and ants can be argued to have “transformed” the planet and its ecology far more than humans.)

Emphasis added.

Dr. Rancourt has a very Left/Progressive outlook, but a portion of his conclusion is worth quoting:

For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.

This conservative finds it hard to disagree. Well, except for that “global extortion” and “geopolitical wars” part. Can’t have everything…

But he touches on a good point: the AGW cultists and alarmists not only want to cripple Western economies and establish bureaucratic-statist control over the lives of individual citizens, but they want to keep poor countries poor, too, by denying them the very means the industrial and post-industrial nations used to become wealthy. It’s no wonder that both China and India have refused to sign on to the global-warming farce; the measures the alarmists demand we take to fight a problem that does not exist would absolutely derail their economic development.

In the great scheme of things, this is just another small crack in the vaunted scientific consensus. By itself, it means little. But, the more cracks appear, the sooner comes the day when the AGW cathedral collapses.

Heretics! Don’t they realize there’s a consensus? That the IPCC has a computer model? How dare these men, two of whom have won Nobel Prizes, defy the Goracle?

Question not. The science is settled. Amen.

Joking aside, these scientists, living and dead, deserve our respect for refusing to go along with a farcical consensus and for reasserting that real science requires skepticism and empirical testing, not just computer models that spit back programmed results.

Skepticism regarding anthropogenic global warming is growing by leaps and bounds in both Britain and Germany, two countries previously largely accepting of this fraud:

Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.

The growing doubts in Germany probably weren’t relieved by this article, also in Der Spiegel.

A thaw of Iceland’s ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said on Friday.

They said there was no sign that the current eruption from below the Eyjafjallajokull glacier that has paralysed flights over northern Europe was linked to global warming. The glacier is too small and light to affect local geology.

“Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger eruptions or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades,” said Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland.

“Global warming melts ice and this can influence magmatic systems,” he told Reuters. The end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago coincided with a surge in volcanic activity in Iceland, apparently because huge ice caps thinned and the land rose.

“We believe the reduction of ice has not been important in triggering this latest eruption,” he said of Eyjafjallajokull. “The eruption is happening under a relatively small ice cap.”

In other words:

“Global warming isn’t in play here, but we’re taking this opportunity to scare you into agreeing to all the harebrained, economy-killing measures the UN, the IPCC, and delusional national governments can think up to deal with a problem that does not exist. Thank you.”

As a commenter at Watts Up With That? pointed out, if the magma chamber is so close to the surface as to be affected by a glacier, then it’s already itself melting the glacier, no CO2 needed.

Next thing you know, global warming will be blamed for stock-market crashes.

RELATED: In fact, undersea volcanoes may explain the calving of huge glaciers in the Antarctic peninsula, while the rest of the Antarctic ice sheet is expanding. It’s also a possible reason for the receding Arctic ice, though that’s expanded again in recent years. Again, no AGW bugbear required.

One sign of a fanatic is that he can’t handle serious disagreement: rather than continue with a rational argument, he threatens violence to intimidate his opponents into silence. You know, fanatics like Greenpeace members:

Emerging battle-bruised from the disaster zone of Copenhagen, but ever-hopeful, a rider on horseback brought news of darkness and light: “The politicians have failed. Now it’s up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It’s not working. We need an army of climate outlaws.”

The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you’re one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let’s talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

This isn’t science and it’s not a quest for truth or even what’s best for all. No, it’s an arrogance and hubris born of a belief that a tiny group knows the collective good, even if the individuals of that “collective” disagree. If they continue to disagree, then those recalcitrant “deniers” have to be silenced by threats or even direct action. It’s a common trait among “progressive activists.”